July 2011

July 30, 2011

If, as I insisted, you'd read Tove Jansson's elliptical, elegant Fair Play or her marvelous The Summer Book, you could perfectly envision the Norwegian island chain where married lesbians Hege Dalen and Toril Hansen [adidas] were eating at their campsite when they heard shots and screams across the water. Did they run and hide? No, they're lesbians, so they jumped in their boat and sped toward the slaughter. The women pulled terrified teens from the water and the rocky coast as the insane far-right gunman shot through their vessel. Unfortunately, there were too many youth to fit in the boat. Hege and Toril ferried the group to safety, then hurried back to the massacre, rescuing another boatload. Then they did it yet again. And still again. Altogether in their four trips they saved forty people from the scene where seventy-six died.

The mainstream U.S. media, which loves a hero story almost as much as a tragedy, has been uniformly silent about the lesbian superstars. Instead, you get a gay man, Bruce Bawer, in his self-serving WSJ piece saying how shocked he is to discover his extremist anti-Islam writings are quoted in the extremist anti-Islam writings of a killer. Ignore him and stick with Tove Jansson.

July 29, 2011

After 20 years, Antonio Banderas is back with Almodóvar in this creepy thriller as a (typically, strangely) sympathetic modern-day Dr. Frankenstein obsessed with creating synthetic super-skin, twelve years after his wife died from burns in a car crash. His beautiful young captive test case played by Penelope Cruz 2.0 newcomer Elena Anaya displays (typically bizarre) strong signs of Stockholm syndrome. Full review in English.

The movie is certain to be at the New York Film Festival, which opens September 30 with Roman Polanski's Carnage starring Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, and Christoph Waltz.

The judges will announce the shortlist on September 6 and the winner on October 18.

I've read the Hollinghurst, to be released here in October, and while you'll want to too, it is not so magnificent that you need to import it immediately from the UK. It's brilliant, of course, and the individual sentences and scenes are a great pleasure, but after 568 pages covering 100 years you see the tradeoffs of his making his protagonist a poem rather than a person. In Britain, where The Stranger's Child debuted at #1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list, they're pushing it as an English country house novel, which Hollinghurst does not appreciate. He hated Downton Abbey and considers Brideshead Revisited to be "a rather baleful sort of book."

Writing in the LRB, Christopher Tayler makes an trenchant point that may also apply to excellent straight novels by queer writers, such as Brooklyn and The Little Stranger:

"The Stranger’s Child is also milder than his previous novels when it comes to what he probably wouldn’t call the heteronormativity of the world at large. There are more women, fewer sex scenes and fewer of the entertaining put-downs – ‘The other man was a morose heterosexual with a pudding-basin haircut and a copy of Mayfair in his locker’ – with which he once countered the disdainfully or cursorily observed gay characters of other books. I missed the sense you get from his earlier novels of an utterly authoritative, unembarrassable voice being brought to bear on disparate areas of experience: Louis Quinze escritoires, cocaine and Ecstasy rushes, a suburban funeral, cruising at Hampstead Ponds. Fewer areas in the new book haven’t been worked over by writers of Hollinghurst’s stature, and there’s a faint note of critic-appeasingness – not a note you’d think of him as needing to strike – in the way he reins in the characters’ knowledge of music and architecture as well as sex."

Do you already know Carol Birch? Apparently Jamrach's Menagerie is her 11th novel and A.S. Byatt calls it "one of the best stories I’ve ever read; an extraordinarily good and completely original book."

July 27, 2011

Continued freefall. So far in 2011, sales of adult hardcovers and trade paperbacks are down 23% and 18% compared to last year (which was a slump). Sales of mass market paperbacks are down 30%. Sales of children's hardcovers and paperbacks are off by 6% and 15%.

Sales of e-books rose 160%.

Since the last dismal sales update: Borders has gone out of business, axing 11,000 employees; LivingSocial has closed its books section; and today the Los Angeles Times killed three of its books columns: Discoveries, Paperbacks, and Word Play. The LAT spokesperson then had the gall to say, "We have not changed our commitment to book coverage."

Proving how little traditional publishing has learned about the changing world, Guardian writer Nick Davies has just signed a deal to write a book about the Murdoch hacking scandal to be published in the fall. Of 2012. When it will be drowned out by the 24/7 madhouse of the elections. Obvs, the story is unfinished now but people do not want to wait fifteen or eighteen months for in-depth hot topic reporting.

A disappointed Captain Cook named the Barren Islands, just north of Kodiak and four hours from home. We had a private cabin, primitive but perfect for us. Other people traveled in a tent, or slept in the aisles.

The thousand mile trip covered more than fifty active volcanoes. Above, Pavlof and Pavlof's Sister, which the ship's naturalist once saw streaming lava at night. One of the hottest spots on the internet is the Alaska Volcano Observatory.

Altogether we made seven brief stops, several of them to treeless, gardenless villages of fewer than eighty people but zillions of wildflowers. Akutan, above, has seventy-five residents. During World War II, Cold Bay was home to 20,000 troops and now has a population of seventy-six. According to the National Weather Service, it is the cloudiest place in the United States.

The utterly hopeless photo far below is for certified whale geeks only. We cruised alongside the largest pod of humpbacks I've ever seen. How many must have been there if ten were spouting simultaneously? (My lens could only capture four in this frame.) The best book on humpbacks is Roger Payne's Among Whales, packed with boogling details such as scientists still have no idea how or where whales generate the sound of the "songs."

The reason the Aleutians are devoid of trees is the epic battering wind, which regularly exceeds 100 mph. We really felt it at Dutch and crossing the Bering Sea, but the birds seemed to frolic. On its previous voyage, the ferry had passed a raft of two million Norther Fulmars. We saw a steady stream of them fly past for hours, a fine start to our 1,003-mile trip aboard the no-frills Alaska Marine Highway ferry M/V Tustumena, which in some ways is like twice-monthly bus service for the Aleutian chain, ignoring the more remote 800 miles from Unalaska to Attu.

Hard to remember as this shy creature gently wooed me on a remote hike that skulks of foxes were the incessant tormentors of the shipwrecked sailors on the Vitus Bering - Georg Steller voyage to find North America from Russia in 1741. Constantly yapping, and starving, the wild foxes bit everything from the toes and nostrils of the dead to the one exposed part of a sailor who tried to answer nature's call in the middle of the night without leaving his tent. The foxes also ran off with Steller's papers and inkwell as he made field notes. Those were native animals. Bigger trouble came later when fur traders introduced other foxes to the islands who eventually decimated the Aleutian Cackling Goose population, among others. A global look at the subject is Alan Burdick's National Book Award-nominated Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion.

At this rate, you'd expect the third day photo to be a silver fox. As it happens, I live with one, but my partner gets camera shy.

July 21, 2011

Our three-hour nonstop flight from Anchorage to the Aleutians became a four-hour journey with a detour to King Salmon to refuel. If we had arrived on time, maybe this black fox would not have been around to greet us.

July 20, 2011

Many adventure readers hadn't heard of the young wanderer Everett Ruess [right], who started ambling at sixteen and disappeared at twenty while hiking the Utah desert in November 1934, until Jon Krauker devoted several pages of Into the Wild to him for the obvious similarities with Christopher McCandless. Several profiles say people claim Ruess was gay, without citing reasons, so I had been very much anticipating yesterday's publication of Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer [[Kindle]] by David Roberts. Not anymore. Short of seeing the book firsthand, there's only this early review on Amazon by a reader from NYC to address the queer question:

"Roberts makes a determined effort to establish that Everett was not a homosexual as some have asserted and implies that if he were, it would somehow discredit him. In doing so, he glosses over a possible explanation of why Ruess felt unfit for conventional society and something that might even be insinuated in his death."

July 19, 2011

"I started this project last year as part of an exhibition called Manifest Equality. I shot as many people that felt like LGBTQ applied to them, that I could get to, and laid stacks of their portraits in the gallery for viewers to take home for free. The message was so simple, but I needed a broader spectrum of faces to really bring the point home. Now my goal is to take the project national, shooting 4,000-5,000 faces across the United States, hitting 25 cities in three big road trips. So far, HRC has made it possible for me to shoot 300 faces in New York City, as a starter run for the bigger project. Eventually we'll launch several large exhibitions, give away thousands of faces, make a book, and hopefully a documentary about people's stories along the way. This website will turn into an online portal where people who I can’t photograph in person, can upload pictures of themselves.If all goes well, people will submit their own photos, and we'll make something of a modern day AIDS quilt."

July 18, 2011

On Saturday, Utah Democrats elected by a big margin openly gay Jim Dabakis to be the party's chairman. He is an art dealer and the co-founder of Equality Utah and of the Utah Pride Center.

Given the Mormons' long history of intolerance and aggressive fighting against gay rights, readers may be surprised to hear Chairman Dabakis chastising Democrats for not being "warm and inviting" enough to LDS members. He told the Salt Lake Tribune:

“I want to talk to LDS people and I want to tell them that we want them in our party, we need them in our party... We recognize that they have a great deal to contribute. ... As chair, my commitment is to make sure that LDS people feel comfortable in our Democrat tent. Sometimes, we haven’t been as warm and as inviting as we should be.”

Others may see the quasi-apology as shrewd politicking.

Saying that "People are broad-minded in Utah," Dabakis reports that while campaigning in all 29 counties, "the whole gay thing just simply did not surface as an issue....they want to know if you can do the job or not."

Also at the convention, in a multi-round, six-way contest, delegates narrowly elected openly gay Brian Doughty to fill the Salt Lake City House seat vacated by out lesbian Jackie Biskupski. She said, "I am excited that the LGBT community will have a voice again on the Hill because I’ve seen what a difference it makes to have someone on the floor who can articulate a personal message on some of the issues that arise, and that is really important, especially during this critical civil-rights time for the LGBT community."

July 15, 2011

If, unlike Rudolph Valentino and Thornton Wilder and a shipload of sailors, you missed out on making it into Sam Steward's Stud File, rating 746 of his sexual partners and recording "the dates and places of their encounters, a coded key of the various sexual acts that took place as well as partners’ penile dimensions," now you can console yourself with seeing that amorous artifact in person. Expanding from the super success of his Secret Historian [[Kindle]] and its companion An Obscene Diary: The Visual World of Sam Steward, Justin Spring has curated a show opening today at the Museum of Sex in New York, "Obscene Diary: The Secret Archive of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist and Pornographer." According to the MoSex blog, "Over 200 of the best artifacts from the Samuel Steward archive will be on display to the public for the first time." It got off with a bangin party last night and will stay up until January 17.

I hope the Stud File cards are duplicated and posted so people can read them. Visitors to this exhibit want more than a look at a box.

Jane Lynch is a current Emmy winner, nominee, and host this year, and she's a double mythbuster: In 2000, she was (1) a forty year-old (2) out lesbian when her career was jumpstarted by a bowl of Kellogg's Corn Flakes. She did a cereal commercial directed by Christopher Guest, who then cast her in Best in Show, where she and Jennifer Coolidge more or less steal the movie as blonde on blonde lovers who plan to publish a magazine, American Bitch, to "focus on the issues of the lesbian purebred dog owner." Before that movie, Jane had been stuck in the typical long slog to success: Born and raised in Dolton, schooled in Normal, she left Illinois for graduate school at Cornell, came back to Chicago, starred on stage as Carol Brady, toured to New York and Los Angeles, returned home, became restless and boomeranged back to L.A., where she lived on lots of rejection and a few bit parts in tv shows and movies. After Best in Showshe's played one inspired nutjob after another: The porn star turned folk singer in A Mighty Wind, the randy boss in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Ricky Bobby's mom in Talladega Nights, Cindy in For Your Consideration, and Gayle, the ex-addict running the Sturdy Wings mentoring program in Role Models. Having had her scenes as Amelia Earhart deleted from the final cut of The Aviator, she got to play Julia Child's / Meryl Streep's sister in Julie & Julia. Then came Glee on 09/09/09with her instantly immortal Sue Sylvester. Today, she's 51.

Two-time Tony winner Arthur Laurents died this year at ninety-two. Born in the Jewish section of Flatbush, he wrote the book for the musicals West Side Story, Gypsy, Anyone Can Whistle, and Hallelujah, Baby!; the novels and the screenplays for The Way We Were and The Turning Point, the screenplay for Rope (starring his then-lover Farley Granger); the play that became the movie Summertime; and he directed I Can Get It for You Wholesale, La Cage Aux Folles, Anyone Can Whistle, and the Broadway versions of Gypsy in 1974 and the recent triple Tony winning revival starring the Patti Lupone. Laurents was openly gay even during the McCarthy era, when he received less work but avoided being blacklisted. Smart people can discuss the obvious and subtle gay substitutes and outsider figures who run through all of Laurents' work. His two memoirs are Original Story By and Mainly on Directing. He and his partner Tom Hatcher lived together fifty-one years, mainly in Quogue, Long Island, until Hatcher's death in 2006. It was Hatcher's idea as he was dying to re-invent West Side Story as a bilingual musical to give Laurents something to do as a new widower. The revival earned four Tony nominations, winning best featured actress in a musical.

July 14, 2011

The remake of Mildred Pierce starring Kate Winslet has earned 21 Emmy nominations, including one for gay director Todd Haynes. Of Glee's 12 nominations, the only two regular cast acting noms are for out lesbian Jane Lynch, who won last year and is hosting the Emmys this year, and gay Kurt's Chris Colfer, who in his category faces four men from Modern Family, which earned 17 nominations. Lots and lots of other gay or gay-adjacent nominees such as Alan Cumming, Nathan Lane, Betty White, Cloris Leachman, Christine Baranski, Bette Midler, Carrie Fisher, Will Arnett, Justin Timberlake, and Kathy Griffin. Full list here.

If you like brains with your English country house envy, get the splendid Downton Abbey, which garnered 11 Emmy nominations. Created by Gosford Park Oscar winner Julian Fellowes, the 6-hour series again nails the twin galaxies of a rich family and their complex servants, this time in England's golden twilight approaching World War I. The cast includes a hot, scheming, gay footman who has an ongoing affair with a young Duke but is later blackmailed by a teasing Turkish temptation [tophatted, above] groaningly named "Kemal Pamuk." Readers of the Nobel winner's The Museum of Innocence see this is akin to a Turkish television show naming its sole American boy "Huck Twain." Watch it now because the second season and a Christmas special are underway.

July 13, 2011

On Sunday, Alice Munro turned eighty. On a civilized planet the day would have been celebrated with bouquets of wildflowers, very expensive champagne, and a quiet half-hour to re-read your favorite story of hers. Probably something from Friend of My Youth or Open Secrets but it might date back from The Moons of Jupiter or The Progress of Love. (For once, novices really can get many of the author's very best works in the Selected Stories.) Proving that she still has new things to say in her eighth decade, Munro last month published Gravel in The New Yorker, marking what may be the first time she has written about a lesbian. I can't think of another; please correct me gently in the comments. Although she almost always uses a female protagonist, she has twice written about gay men, memorably in 1980's Turkey Season (from The Moons of Jupiter) and 1993's The Jack Randa Hotel (in Open Secrets). Her thirteenth collection of stories is coming in October 2012.

All three novels by Bay Area Reporter arts editor Jim Provenzano debuted on Kindle a few days ago. I haven't read his much-cited gay wrestling novel Pins or his subsequent Monkey Suits and Cyclizen, but I mention them because this is what all authors should be doing with their backlist. Vexingly, a search on Kindle and Nook yields only two of Stephen McCauley's six novels, all of them essential, must-own reading.

Digital books are increasingly outselling their print counterparts. Ownership of e-readers has doubled in the past six months. Now 12% of adults in America own such a device, according to a Pew survey released June 27. On Sunday, Google joins the fray with its Story HD exclusively at Target. This is the first e-reader to have wifi access to Google's massive e-book library.

Remember, you can download the Kindle reading software to your computer or your smart phone for free. This, in turn, lets you download thousands of public domain classics that are also free. With so many Kindle authors pricing their books at .99 to $2.99 to attract more readers, Provenzano has lowered his prices from $9.99 to $6.99.

"A presciently written novel of athletics in small town America, a grippingly real account and a chilling reminder of how far we still have to travel." -- Felice Picano

"A heartfelt and touching story, unwaveringly authentic and compelling. His characters wrestle with each other, vividly, and also with larger issues of sexuality, faith and family." -- Michael Lowenthal

"Juggling AIDS activism, corporate and individual greed, all through the travails of a bike messenger in search of love and belonging, Cyclizen is noteworthy for its fine characterization and poignant lyricism. Provenzano explores love and friendship with insight and nuance, marking his work as unique, vital and significant." -- Trebor Healey

July 12, 2011

In the decade from her first feature when she was cast at an open call of 350 women vying for the lead in the micro-budget boxing movie Girlfight (2000) to her star turn as the butch, subversive pilot willing to die to save the blue people in the top grossing film of all time, Avatar, Michelle Rodriguez has always been adrenaline personified. She's perfected that role on screen in two of the Fast and Furious flicks, S.W.A.T., Resident Evil, the tv show Lost, and the surfer grrrl gem Blue Crush. Rodriquez has also cemented that persona off-screen with an arrest for assault, numerous speeding violations, DUI, opting for jail time rather than community service, violation of her probation, lying "clerical errors" about when she did / didn't do her forced community service, and a second stint in the slammer (18 days of a 180 day sentence, released because of overcrowding). Her lawyers blame her erratic behavior on the price of fame compounded by pressure to hide her sexuality a reaction to allergy medicine. Half Mexican, half Puerto Rican, and happy to play with her bad girl image in a Hollywood still obsessed with blond, squeak clean facades, Rodriguez is not quite so rad as to actually come out. Yet in the contest of cracking open the closet door by centimeters, she is whole inches ahead of Queen Latifah, Jodie Foster, et al. While she frequently says, "I am not a lesbian," she also tells the media she has been with both sexes. Her partners and film colleagues have been even more helpful, and more specific, as when Kristanna Loken went public about their relationship and out lesbian Guinevere Turner confirmed it. Rodriguez again played a marine earlier this year in Battle: Los Angeles. Today she's 33.